


All Of Them Are Lost

by Kastaka



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Loki is returned to Asgard in chains, at least one person is still glad to see him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Of Them Are Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raktajinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/gifts).



They appear in the throne room, of course.

Small mercies. The audience chamber is empty. Odin sits in the throne, and Freya stands beside; both of them do not wear anger on their faces, but disappointment.

Anger would be better, and they know it. Maybe they feel it. Maybe they are hiding this from him because they know it will be worse this way; worse even for the very thought that they can hide their true faces from him, as shackled and bound as he is.

He cannot speak. They do not speak. 

He feels as though he should kneel. As though Thor should be making him kneel. They have had captives here before, in this position; Thor holding their chains, Loki at his left shoulder like the shadow he has always been.

What comes next is that Thor casts them to the ground, and declares their crimes.

But it does not come. 

He looks at the ground, because there is nowhere else he can look. 

Because he knows that the confident declaration of the Chitauri is yet to transpire, but already he longs for the understandable punishment that would be dealt out to common miscreants in his position.

He knows that the silence will stretch. That it will become intolerable. That eventually he will break. Then he will kneel himself, without any prompting, and beg for forgiveness with the lines of his posture.

Unless Thor breaks first. But that will be a long time coming. 

His brother is content to stand there like a huge dog displaying his catch proudly to his masters. He could stand there for eons, perfectly framed in his great heroic sorrow, handing over the creature he thought to own, which had turned and bitten his hand.

The silence stretches.

His magic has been taken from him, but he can still listen. There is something wrong about one of the guards behind him. Something wrong in his breathing.

Something wrong in _her_ breathing, he corrects himself. But that is not all.

And it is not Loki, or Thor, or Odin, or Freya who breaks the silence.

"Loki," says Sif, from her position flanking the door with some other guard who has not merited their attention enough to notice their name.

And it is a breath of such despair, the natural endpoint of so many times that it has had a lift in it -

\- the difference between falling from a cliff of ice, the playful scolding, oh Loki what have you got into this time? -

\- and falling from the Rainbow Bridge into the void - 

that despite the magnetic pull that the onlooking faces of Odin and Freya still exert on him, he turns, and it is her that he falls to his knees before.

He cannot speak, but the way that he cannot meet her eyes speaks for him:

I know that I am too far gone for you to forgive me.

She darts across the distance between them, and takes his face in her hand, and lifts his gaze to hers.

The fierceness in her gaze has her reply within it, but she speaks it in any case:

"Do not make the mistake of underestimating me, my love."

There is a moment when Thor grips the hilt of Mjonilr until it seems like he might successfully dislocate his own fingers, and then Odin clears his throat.

"You will return the Tesseract to its rightful place," he declares.

Thor needs no more encouragement to take the opportunity to escape.

\----

"What are we going to do with you, then?"

Sif pulls Loki to his feet, and turns him to face his mother, as she addresses them.

He looks sideways, down, away.

There is no situation in which he can meet Freya's gaze. Not vulnerable like this; not stripped of his powers. Not however much he tries to remind himself that they are only manipulating him; that they raised him for their own cynical purposes...

That they cannot, truly, care about their Jotun cuckoo, especially now that he has proven that he cannot play nicely with the other children. Now that he has nailed his colours to the mast, how can they do other than reject him? 

So there must be some new plan behind this. Some scheme that he could easily see through, if only the weight of the shackles did not drag at his perception and keep his sharpest tools of intellect at bay along with the magic they would let him perform.

And the hand that Sif has kept wrapped around his arm?

That, he can barely process at all, and he knows that he cannot do so safely in such a state of mind as he finds himself. Maybe he would not be able to do so in any state of mind. Not after the wrong that he has done, that no true warrior of Asgard could tolerate.

That she can still bring herself to touch him, and in kindness rather than rebuke?

He thinks that maybe he will never understand.

"Isn't it a little harsh to ask him that," replies Sif, "when he cannot speak?"

He is sure that he catches a moment of it, even though it is swiftly wiped away as if it had never been. Freya is _surprised_ by Sif's words. Odin is looking at Sif with a steady gaze which Loki has seen destroy much stronger men in his presence.

She stands tall and proud and unbent - and she stands next to him, where his brother in such a circumstance would be a tiny step ahead, and the hand on his arm would be a warning as much as a protective gesture, whereas he thinks this one is meant as a comfort.

For her, he begins to realise, as much as for him.

"You know why he cannot be allowed to speak," Freya tells her, and it is the motherly tone that she uses, with just a little undertone of 'run along now'.

"I know he would never have me speak for him," she says, and he lets out a breath he did not know he was holding, because he was so sure that the next words would be 'Then I would speak for him', and that would be exactly what his brother would say.

Not his brother. It is so hard to keep that in his mind, here before them - but so much more vital than ever before.

 _He_ is not his brother, and _she_ is a dangerous enemy, as much as he cannot help taking some kind of primal reassurance by her touch on his skin.

"But I would speak in his defence," she continues, "as you have deprived him of the chance."

"Do you not know what he has done, Sif?" rumbles Odin. His voice is soft, low, dangerous; he has no need to thunder here, and he obviously knows that would only make her stand her ground more fiercely.

"I think I know enough," she replies. "I did not think for a moment that the fate of Midgard alone would alarm you to this degree, if you are wondering about the depths of my ignorance."

The steady pressure of Odin's gaze changes in kind at that point; Loki can sense it even with his dulled senses, feels the moment where Sif's grip tightens involuntarily. He knows that she can feel Odin reading her, his gaze travelling through her defiant expression into her knowledge and her memories.

"How can you stand here like this?" Odin demands. "Knowing what you do. How can you presume to defend him?"

"Love has no boundaries," she replies. "Love has no limitations. I do not expect you to understand. But I do expect you to listen."

"You realise what this means," Odin warns her, "if you are unsuccessful?"

And Loki does turn then, not to look at Odin or Freya, but to look at Sif - slightly up at Sif, but nowhere near as far as his brother's face would be - and in his eyes he is trying to tell her not to do this, but the sentiment dies somewhere in his powerless throat.

Instead, his gaze asks, _you would do this, for me?_

She answers with a sideways look. Irritation and fondness. _Of course. What else could I?_

\----

On her recognizance, he is allowed some little freedom.

His hands are unlocked; the shackles replaced with cuffs, much the same as to his magic, but permitting him a measure of dignity in his everyday business. 

He is allowed back to his rooms, after servants have removed every trace of items of power at Freya's direction.

He sees his brother in passing. Thor seems distracted, and irritable, and Loki suspects he wanted to be the one who was responsible for such magnanimity.

He is allowed neither to speak nor write, and he is aware of the anxious servants who are posted to watch him, in case at any moment he might do something crazy.

He has thought about it. It is hard to think, with the cuffs draining his energy, but he could of course improvise some manner of writing or code if he wanted to.

When Sif had escorted him out of the great hall and into the guest quarters where he was to await the cleansing of his rooms, he had begun to converse by blinking, but she had simply shaken her head.

"Do not make them take that away from you too, my love," she had warned him.

If there had been something to tell her, it would have been different.

But what was he going to say? 

She knew what she set herself up against, by showing him kindness; by taking his side against the whole universe that was now arrayed against him, she knew that she would share in the inevitable fate that it had in mind for him.

Yet she is not afraid, or if she is, she doesn't let it show; it would be undignified for both of them, a mockery of what lay between them, for him to beg her to stop - to save herself - and that is all he had in him to say.

He knows very well that there is no explanation, nothing he can weave to help her with her cause, with half his mind locked away behind the runes that glow softly on the cuffs they make him wear.

Instead, she keeps him sane. Or as sane as he can be, in the circumstances.

He knows that she has plenty to do in preparing his defence, in speaking with Odin and Freya and many of the nobles of this place and other places, making allegiances, promoting understanding, maybe even exaggerating the few redeeming features in his actions.

But she is always there to play a game with him (in which he meticulously avoids encoding any additional information in the moves), or to make sure that he can be brought some of those few books that were deemed impossible to be of any use in escape, or just to wordlessly run her fingers through his hair.

And gradually he comes back to himself, and he remembers her as they were, and through it he remembers himself as he was.

And she is no longer his enemy.

She keeps him briefly up to date with her progress, but beyond that she says very little; not that she was usually the most loquacious of people in normal circumstances, but she is careful not to use what he is not allowed in his presence more than necessary.

She tells him, also, that Thor is attempting to gather what resources he can in order to fund another trip back to Midgard.

But the gathering tide of the war effort - for war it will be, and soon, they all understand - is impeding Thor's progress in pursuing his personal objectives. And it seems like he gets into more duels, or outright fights, or other expressions of his frustration with every passing day.

Sif does not have to tell Loki not to expect too much of Asgardian justice.

Loki does not ask her for anything that she would not freely give.

\----

"Usually, in this position, we would sentence one of our own accused of such a crime to the task of making it right."

Odin is speaking for an audience, now.

It is going better than either of them had dared to hope.

"However, there seems to be no circumstance under which we can keep you in a useful state," he continues, "and also be able to guarantee your good behaviour."

"I will stand guarantee for him," declares Sif. It is a strong declaration, which she has obviously rehearsed for the occasion.

"And could you contain him, should he break his word?" Odin challenges her.

"I will hunt him down," swears Thor, "with the best of Midgard at my back, should he do as much as thinking about putting a single toe out of line."

There is a pause, as the room waits for him to summon the effort required to make the necessary second half of the statement.

"I will hunt _them_ down," Thor corrects himself, at last. He cannot keep the pain out of his voice at the acknowledgement, but this only brings him greater respect from his audience. "And knowing this," he continues, in a manner seemingly unexpected even by Odin, "I do not think that my brother will stray."

Freya looks at him with something that approaches outright wonder; the look on a mother's face when she realises that her boy is grown.

"I believe that the accused also knows," explains Odin, for the audience's sake, "that should he fail in his endeavours, then he will have brought on himself a punishment greater than the incalculable harm that will be done to our Realms; and that anticipation in itself is punishment enough for his misdemeanours."

"If that is all?" asks one of the participants from Alfheim; it is their right to call proceedings to a close when they feel they are suitably concluded.

"That is all," confirms Odin.

And the muzzle releases at the sides; Sif swipes it off his face and throws it to the ground, contemptuously.

He thinks about saying something clever. He thinks, fleetingly, as the runes fade on his wrists, of escape. He knows about running. He knows about hiding. He knows that she would come with him, if he did, if he asked.

But all of the mad, impassioned speeches about how they would regret their generosity; all of the fear-crazed reflexes that begged him to dart between the layers of reality and lose himself amongst nightmares and dreams; even the voice of the little boy who wanted to be king, telling him to thank his constituents for their forbearance and make the best impression that he can on this assemblage of important people;

all of them are lost as Sif closes the space between them, places her arms around him, and with one look at the expression on his unmasked face, kisses him unashamedly before the whole congregation.


End file.
